I had read about people looking down the barrel of a gun: how time seems to slow down and they look back over the course of their lives, flashing back to childhood or perhaps a wedding or the birth of a child; sometimes they even notice the smallest details of the weapon pointed at them, from the darkness of the bore to the smudged fingerprint on the barrel. In real life, however, it wasn’t like that at all.
In fact, it was all over so fast that I only had enough time to throw my hands up as if believed I were Wonder Woman and my bracelets could deflect the bullet. At the same time, there was a sharp crack and a puff of smoke rose like magic from the pistol.
There was no time to think a final thought, no time to beg for mercy; there was only the blast of the gun immediately followed by something that almost sounded like a gnat whizzing by my head.
My muscles had tensed in expectation of the shot and for a moment I couldn’t understand why the burst of pain never came. My hands scrambled over my body, desperately searching for the blood I was sure had to be oozing from the wound but coming up clean time and time again.
Doc let out a long whoop and threw both of his hands straight into the air, bouncing on the tips of his toes as a smile spread across his face.
“Son of a bitch, Carl… one shot! Who da man? You da man!”
Carl brushed past me and I turned in bewilderment, feeling like a person who’d walked into a theater halfway through the movie. A thousand thoughts raced through my head and I felt as though my entire body sighed as the certainty that I had not been shot took hold.
Carl had made his way to the side of the silo and I tried to remember if the body had been lying there before. Didn’t Doc say they had killed two of those things? Or had he said a few?
The corpse was lying on its back and I could see blood seeping into the snow, radiating out from its head like a crimson halo. It was dressed in a ratty, blue bathrobe with a single bunny slipper adorning one foot; the other was bare and I could see black, swollen splotches on the toes and ankle.
“Freshie.” Carl called back, his voice sounding distant and muffled by the blanket of snow surrounding us. “Ain’t been dead more than a week I reckon. Maybe two seein’ as how cold it’s been.”
He crouched and began rummaging through the creature’s pockets.
“If there’s any more around here,” Doc shouted back, “that gunshot is going to bring them running. We need to get going.”
“Hot damn! Nearly full pack of smokes here. Lighter too.”
Carl pocketed the cigarettes and undid the loose knot in the robe’s belt. Then he rolled the thing onto its side and slipped one of the beefy arms out of the sleeve.
Doc squinted in the glare of the sun and scanned the horizon.
“Come on, Carl. We gotta get a move on!”
Carl came running back, his boots crunching through the icy crust, and the robe cradled in his arms like a baby; the fallen zombie was left naked and face down…. For a moment I almost felt sorry for the thing. It had once been someone’s son, perhaps a husband and father. It had worried about the same things we all used to: bills, the cost of gasoline, terrorism. Now the last shred of dignity had been stripped from its body and it found true death in the same manner it had originally came into the world: cold, naked, and alone.
Maybe Carl saw something in my eyes as he passed. Or perhaps he instinctively knew what I was thinking.
“There were bits of flesh still stuck in its teeth.” he said. “And I guaran-fucking-tee it wasn’t chicken.”
He walked over to where Sadie and Watchmaker stood, wrapped the robe around one of them, adding another layer of warmth and protection.
“Shit girl,” Doc mumbled as he placed a hand on my shoulder, “you act like you’ve never seen one of those bastards killed before.”
Later that evening we managed to find an old farmhouse that seemed like an oasis of normality in the flat fields. Carl and Doc had left me outside with Sadie and Watchmaker as they swept each room of the house; I held an ax in my hands and was told , in no uncertain terms, that if things went bad not to try anything foolish.
“You just see these two somewhere warm,” Carl had said as he handed me the ax. “We’ve been working our way south. Keep heading that way.”
But the instructions proved unnecessary; after nearly a quarter hour of hearing their voices call out “Clear!” every few minutes, they finally appeared in the doorway and ushered the rest of us inside.
By the time the sun had begun to set, we had settled into the relative comfort of the living room. The couches and chairs were as old and dusty as some of the pictures hanging upon the wall; springs that were barely concealed by threadbare floral patterns poked into our butts and backs and the entire place had the musty smell of age. We had broken some of the kitchen chairs and had the wood neatly stacked in the stone fireplace with layers of blankets covering every window of the living room; now we were only waiting for night to camouflage the smoke that would soon be curling from the chimney, only waiting for the warmth our bodies so desperately craved.
Even without the fire, though, we were able to peel off some of clothing now that we were free from the bite of the wind; and, for the first time, I got a good look at Sadie and the man called Watchmaker.
Sadie’s skin looked as soft and wrinkled as old tissue, her eyes like two dusty sapphires. Her hair, which was the color of old ash, was pulled back into a tight bun and somehow her neck looked as thin and frail as a dry twig beneath the bulk of sweaters and scarves.
What little hair Watchmaker had, on the other hand, was as white as the snow we had recently trudged through… most of it taking the form of a bushy beard that flowed nearly down to the hollow in his neck. His flesh, while as deeply wrinkled as his wife’s, looked more like old leather than tissue and his eyes were milky white, like a can of paint that had been spilled into water.
“… and then that sunnava bitch hit that poor girl. Right in the head with a shovel. Took her can of beans and never looked back.”
Sadie shook her head slowly as she finished her story, the frown on her face causing new wrinkles to form around her mouth and eyes.
“Wouldn’t have happened back in the day.” Watchmaker piped in. “Even before all this you had people runnin’ around like they ain’t got a lick of sense. But most of ’em at least had a lick of decency. But now…. ”
I reached forward and touched his hand, amazed at how easy it was to feel the bone beneath the flesh and muscle.
“It’ll come back on them.” I said. “You’ll see.”
I heard Carl scoff from his place in the easy chair and turned to see him shaking his head like someone listening to a child spin an obvious lie.
“I’m sorry, did I miss something, Carl?”
“Oh no, ma’am. Not at all.”
He fished a cigarette from the pack he’d taken from the corpse and ran it under his nose, inhaling deeply. His face, however, still looked mildly bemused.
“Carl doesn’t believe in any of that.” Doc explained with a nod toward his friend.
“Any of what?”
With a flick of the lighter, Carl lit the cigarette and leaned back in the chair with his head tilted toward the ceiling. He slowly released a plume of smoke from his lungs before saying anything.
“Heaven and hell, Karma… all that shit. The way I see it, it ain’t nothing more than a way for people to cope. Bad things happen to good people, but it gives them comfort to think there’s some sorta justice out there. Even if they have to wait ’til they die for it to happen.”
“But there is justice.” I interrupted. “The Universe seeks balance. It does in everything. Light and dark, positive and negative. Nature has a way of …”
“Damn girl, there’s no justice out there. Just survival. And, to be perfectly honest, murdering pricks like the one Sadie was talking about will probably last longer than an honest man.”
Carl paused to take another drag from his cigarette. I wanted to argue with him, to prove that he was wrong; but I was still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that his view of humanity was so bleak.
“Expecting life to be fair just because you’re a good person,” he continued, “is like standing in front of a rotter and expecting it not to attack because you’re a pacifist.”
“So why bother then?” I stammered. “I’ve seen how you take care of Sadie and Watchmaker. And I’ve gathered they’re not family …”
“Right as rain about that.” Watchmaker said. “Before last month never saw neither of these two boys before.”
“And you still haven’t seen me, blind man. Unless you’ve been lying about something all along.”
The others laughed and Carl continued smoking, leaning forward in his chair with a grin.
“No wait,” I interjected, “I have to understand this. If you don’t believe in any type of repercussions why even bother? Why not ditch these two as zombie bait and haul ass at the first sign of trouble?”
Carl had an amused twinkle in his eyes, but his brow furrowed in a manner that made him appear entirely serious.
“Wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”
He shrugged and crushed the cigarette out on the bottom of his shoe.
“Just the way I was raised, I reckon.”
“But you have to believe in something.” I insisted.
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right… I believe I’ll have another smoke.”
There was another round of laughter and I remember studying Carl as he lit his second cigarette. I watched how quickly the smile melted from his face, how the twinkle in his eyes faded into that eons old stare, and noticed, for the first time, how he looked at the others through a mask of sadness. As if he somehow knew that this closeness, this fleeting sense of togetherness and belonging, could never withstand the ravages of the new world we’d been thrust into.
And, as I sat there studying this man, I remember wondering exactly what he had seen through those eyes. Since the day the first corpses began to stir with new life, we’d all lost loved ones. We had all felt the pangs of heartbreak, of loneliness and loss. But there was something more to him, something deeper than all of that… and it was something I thought would probably take a lifetime to understand.